Words Nicola Tyson  Photography Carlton Davis

Published in No 13

A consultation with author and tarot scholar Rachel Pollack is a stimulating and sometimes challenging experience. Her approach to divination could be described as cerebral, as befits a world authority on the subject. She has lectured about tarot the world over and her seminal and influential book on the subject, Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom, has never been out of print in the 40 years since she first penned it.

Seated at the table in her Rhinebeck, New York living room, she is a gently imposing and very witty personality, and laughter often punctuates the heady work of a reading. Other than spreading a silk cloth on which to lay the cards, there is nothing in the way of the occult ritual or any of the paraphernalia people often associate with divinatory consultations. She does, however, have a fondness for beautiful fountain pens and will take notes in a little notebook as you, the querent, outline your pressing questions. Then, after asking you to shuffle and cut the pack in the customary way, the reading will calmly commence, as she deals the cards from the top. No more fretting, no picking from fanned cards … the deal has been struck and now your job is to listen and see where the cards take each of you: for there’s the sense of a shared adventure and the challenge to be willing and open, slightly nerve-rackingly, to the wisdom that will be revealed.

Rachel has collaborated with artists on a number of decks since she first designed her own, the magical Shining Tribe Tarot, back in the ‘90s. She also wrote the first exposition on the Salvador Dali Tarot, and famously advised artist Niki de Saint Phalle — the subject of a recent survey at MOMA PS1 — during the building of her extraordinary tarot sculpture garden in the Tuscan countryside, a project that took some 20 years to complete.

Tarot is not the only string to Rachel’s bow, however. An acclaimed author, she has written 46 books, winning two prestigious awards for science fiction, and has been translated into 15 languages. In the early ‘90s, she was hired by DC Comics to write for the now cult-classic comic book series Doom Patrol, introducing their first transgender character, Coagula. Rachel is herself a trans woman and has lately become something of a trans icon for the younger LGBTQ generation.

Nicola Tyson When did you first encounter the tarot?

Rachel Pollack Well, I discovered the tarot and it discovered me, in 1970, when a colleague where I was teaching offered to read my cards if I gave her a lift home. I remember nothing of the reading now, but I was so struck by the images on the cards! They were so mysterious… scenes like moments in a story or a dream … why are these people in a boat, where are the coming from, where are they going, why do the woman and child look huddled, why do they carry swords? Who is the ferryman? It was the Rider-Waite deck and I thought, “I have to have this,” but it took quite a bit of searching to find a deck back then.

NT In the early ‘70s, tarot was by no means as mainstream as it is now. You were very instrumental in bringing it to wider audience, shifting it from being an occult fortune-telling game to become an invaluable tool for self-discovery.

RP Yes, before this period there were two ways in which tarot was written about: there were the very complicated occult books, which would require you to study a great deal about occultism to comprehend and, on the other hand, just these simple fortune telling books; you know, this card means “an inheritance” and so forth. But to my mind you could do this other thing, which was use the pictures as your springboard and the readings as a method of self-exploration, which I don’t think anyone had been doing: a method by which we could get out of our own expectations.

NT You’ve said, “It’s not about what’s going to happen, but what can happen — what’s possible.”

RP They have something they want to show us, they open new ideas for us, and they reveal things we never thought of but were always there.

NT … and “Any tarot reading that’s done with any honesty is an act of risk, an act of courage.”

RP It’s always a risk because you might see something you don’t like or you might be told something that’s good but you’re not ready for, and it will challenge you. There’s always a risk, like gambling…

NT And you might “lose”!

RP There are certain ways in which a tarot reading is like poker. The game tarocchi, which some people think is the earliest manifestation of the tarot cards, is an ancestor of bridge. But tarocchi has more sense of chance than bridge does, which is much more a game of wits because all the cards are dealt, there’s nothing new coming. To be good at poker, like tarot, you have to understand the cards, the people you’re playing with, and your own psychology. But no matter how good you are, it can always completely upend you. You can be totally in control, carefully manipulating your cards and yet the very last card to be dealt still gives your opponent a 2% chance of winning. Then that card will come, and they will win. A tarot reading is similar … everything can be moving in a great direction and then that last card can show you something that can just shock you and change every card that came before it.

NT It’s fascinating how no card operates alone but rather in relationship to the others and to their placement in the spread.

RP It’s quite remarkable, the one thing we can say for certain is that we’ll never come to the end of it, tarot, it’s constantly opening new avenues. What’s so great about now is that it’s possible, through crowdfunding, for people to make their own decks and get them out there without needing a publisher. So now you have a real diversity represented. There are decks from cultures all over the world and decks that represent all kinds of bodies — shapes, sizes and ages, varied genders, differently-abled — and it’s so exciting to see this because no longer do you have to adjust yourself to fit into the old European model, you can find yourself in these new decks.

NT Interpreting a tarot spread is a creative act. Internal resonances bounce around. It reminds me of making a painting, where colors and marks talk to each other and the meaning arises, gradually, from the sum of the parts.

RP It’s a creative act that occurs between three people, the querent, the reader, and the cards, which to me act as a third person.

NT As an artist, I find the images and colors in your deck, The Shining Tribe Tarot, really unlikely and intriguing. You don’t even use the customary tarot suits of cups, swords, wands and pentacles but instead equivalents of your own, like birds or stones. I know other artists who feel this way too — some have even referenced your images in their own work!

RP It’s been very gratifying to me that the people who respond most powerfully to The Shining Tribe deck are artists. Tarot people thought they were too “childlike” at first — like “outsider” art.

NT That’s what’s so great about them! How did the deck develop?

RP I’d been working with tarot for 22 years and I’d written a book called The New Tarot that looked at all the different decks that had come out in the ‘70s and ‘80s — it was still possible to do a book like that then, now there’s thousands of decks — and I thought maybe I should do my own. I’d always been attracted to the ancient art of different cultures. In fact, the art I feel most powerfully drawn to is Australian-aboriginal desert art, along with cave art, especially Lascaux, which is so complex. Almost all the images just came to me…  something I saw, a trip I did, an experience I had — and then it became a card. It just grew gradually over 4 years or so. Most people who design a tarot deck have a concept, a structure and a plan but mine developed simply by discovery.

NT Didn’t the artist Niki de Saint Phalle encourage you in this?

RP Yes, in a wonderful way. I’d gotten to know Nikki — she’d written to me that she was making this tarot sculpture garden — and she asked if I would be willing to come to Italy and advise her. This was the mid ‘80s. So, I visited her at the garden in Garavicchio, in Tuscany, then sometime later she asked me to come to Paris to do a reading for her. I was living in Amsterdam at the time, which was just a train ride away. I showed her my primitive little hand-drawn cards — I’d only designed half the cards by then — but still, she wanted me to use these. They were just sketches I’d made to show a “real artist” what I wanted, but I hadn’t yet found anyone I could work with. They were either too busy or didn’t get it. “Do it yourself,” Niki said. “But I’m not a trained artist!” I said. “No, no,” she said, “you must make them yourself!” And I thought, OK, if Niki says I must do it myself, I must do it myself.

NT Niki was a self-taught artist too! Her sculptures are so joyful…

RP Spectacular and exuberant. And she brought to the tarot this powerful feminist consciousness and excitement, this love of color, this love of plastic form … they were just these flowing images that were, at the same time, statues, bodies and buildings.

NT When taking notes or, indeed, writing the first draft of a novel, you always write in longhand with a fountain pen…

RP Yes, I have at least 200 fountain pens!

NT How does this aid the creative process for you?

RP There’s an intimacy when you write long hand… you, the page and the instrument and the ink … I can’t write first drafts on the computer unless it’s something pretty simple. I have to write longhand, or it doesn’t flow, it doesn’t open up, and writing long hand with a fountain pen opens it up in very intense ways. Right now, I’m working on a memoir / autobiography kind of thing, and I’ve given up on the idea of it being linear, in any way. I start writing one thing and it turns into something else, and that leads into something else and then I get back to the first thing. So … I’m just going to begin with a warning: this book is circular, it’s like a tarot reading.

Rachel Pollack

Nicola Tyson is an artist and writer represented by petzel.com. Tyson was featured in UD Issue 10. @nicola_tyson

Carlton Davis is a regular contributor to UD. He shoots for Tanqueray, Ralph Lauren and Vera Wang, among others, and is represented by CLM-Agency.com @carltond